Barack Obama budgets most dramatic change in decades

In places, plan is unapologetically liberal agenda

February 27, 2009|By Janet Hook, WASHINGTON BUREAU and Christi Parsons and Ben Meyerson of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Just a month into his presidency, Barack Obama is calling for the most dramatic change in decades in the way the country tackles its most pressing problems -- from the economy and health care to energy, education and taxes. Government, he says, must take the lead -- do things big, and do them now.

Not since Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt has a president moved to expand the role of government so much on so many fronts -- and with such a demanding sense of urgency.

The scope of Obama's ambition was laid bare in the budget blueprint issued Thursday. It would raise taxes, redistribute income, spend more on social programs than on defense and implement policies that touch almost every aspect of Americans' lives -- their banks, health care, schools, even the air they breathe.

Even starker than the breadth of Obama's proposals was his determination to break with the conservative principles that have dominated policymaking since former President Ronald Reagan's election in 1980."It changes the whole paradigm," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) "We're going to have a government that helps people."

Indeed, Obama's budget plan asserts that, in some areas, government can do a better job than private enterprise and do it for less. For instance, he argues, Washington can provide loans to college students just as efficiently and at lower cost than private lenders.

And after years of steady growth in the share of the nation's wealth owned by its most affluent citizens, Obama is calling for tax changes that would require high-income taxpayers to shoulder more of the load -- including limits on their ability to deduct mortgage interest payments.

There is some question whether all this is more change than even some of Obama's fellow Democrats can believe in. That may be especially true of members of the House and Senate who in recent years have won election from traditionally conservative and Republican areas by positioning themselves as moderate-to-conservative, especially on spending and the deficit -- "Blue Dog" Democrats as they are called.

While Obama's supporters enjoy a fairly comfortable margin in the House, his $787 billion economic stimulus package passed the Senate only after a deal was struck with conservative Democrats and three moderate Republicans.

And in proposing action on such a wide range of fronts, Obama risks overloading the often cumbersome machinery of Capitol Hill.

"I cannot remember a time when Congress had an agenda of this scope, size and difficulty," said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who spent 34 years in the House. He compared the magnitude of Obama's agenda to that of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society," which launched a costly "War on Poverty" and pushed through the most far-reaching civil rights laws since the Civil War.

Yet Obama already has demonstrated an ability to get Congress to break its institutional inertia and act big and fast on urgent problems. The economic stimulus legislation was one of the biggest bills in history, and it made it through the congressional maze in record time.

Part of his approach to achieving that was to set the broad parameters of the initiative and leave it to congressional Democrats to fill in the details. On the stimulus, Obama had two demands: The package had to be big, and it had to be approved quickly.

In the new budget blueprint -- a basic outline of the detailed budget to be submitted to Congress in April -- Obama has similarly left it to Congress to write the details of his health-care initiative. But he wants it placed at the top of Capitol Hill's agenda.

"The urgency on health care is now," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "After 60 years of yakking about health care, he's saying, 'I don't want to wait for year 61.'"

All this has left Republicans largely on the sidelines, despite earlier talk about a new era of bipartisanship. Indeed, the budget's sharp U-turn from conservative principles shows how willing Obama is to confront Republicans directly.

Even a relatively moderate Republican like Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) bridles. "We seem to be going back to class warfare," he said.

Obama's leadership style is a far cry from other recent presidents such as Bill Clinton, who made an art form of proposing modest initiatives -- such as requiring school uniforms as a step toward improving education -- and on big issues tacked to the center.

He was the president who declared "the era of big government is over."

Responding to Obama's budget, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said, "The era of big government is back, and Democrats are asking you to pay for it."

The scope of Obama's ambition should not be surprising, because the arc of his own life has been a monument to ambition. Just five years ago, he was a little-known state senator.